Sunday, December 11, 2011

Scientists still puzzled by a fractal discovered 500 years ago: Strip the leaves off of the average tree, soak the whole thing in water until it gets mushy, bundle the branches up together, and you'll get what looks like one long trunk. That's what Leonardo Da Vinci said in the fifteen hundreds. If a tree trunk splits off into three main branches, each of the branches will be one third the size of the trunk. When each of those branches splits into three again, making nine branches on the second 'tier' of the tree, each of these second tier branches will be one ninth the side of the trunk. As the branches grow and split, they will always be a particular fraction of the size of the trunk, and adding together all the fractional bits of each 'tier' of branches will always add up to 'one trunk.'